Idle time logout mechanism (daemon)

[David H. Brierley]

There is more than one reason possible for wanting (needing) to
run an "idle time logout daemon".  We have a fairly large user
community competing for a limited number of ports on our machines
and (in the past) would frequently find 5 or more users that had
been idle for 30 minutes or more.  Some of these people were
intentionaly doing something to tie up the port and thus guarantee
themselves a port for later, but a large majority of them simply
got distracted from the terminal and forget to log off.  If these
people were then called on the phone and reminded that they had
an idle terminal still logged in, more often than not they would
log off.  I am a firm believer in not doing something manually
that the computer can do for me so I wrote a daemon that would
check for idle logins and send the user a friendly message
telling them that they were idle and to please log off.  Since
there is a possibility (high probability) that the user has actually
left the office and is nowhere near the terminal, after three such
messages (5 minutes apart) the daemon will drop carrier on the
terminal line.  The daemon goes to great lengths to determine if
the user is really idle or is just running something that hasn't
taken any input from the terminal in a while.

As far as educating the users go, we also have an ongoing effort
in that regard.  Most of our users now remember to log off when
they are done because they know they they get these "cute"
reminders if they dont.  By the way, did I mention that the
daemon prints the login id and the length of time that they have
been idle on the system console for all to see.  If we notice
a user intentionally doing something to make their terminal
appear to not be idle, their login is locked out and they must
have a heart-to-heart talk with the manger of operations in order
to be allowed back on.  They tend not to do this more than once.

In the end, user education is probably the only legitimate route
to take but a friendly idle time logout deamon can be effectively
used as an educational tool.
-- 
	Dave Brierley
	Raytheon Co.; Portsmouth RI; (401)-847-8000 x4073
	...!decvax!brunix!rayssd!dhb
	...!allegra!rayssd!dhb
	...!linus!rayssd!dhb